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McGruber writes "CNN has the news that some financial lending companies claim that Facebook social connections can be a good indicator of a person's creditworthiness. One company determines if you are friends with someone who was late paying back a loan; if so, that is bad news for you. It is even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with. Another company gathers information from the manner in which a customer fills out the online loan application. The chances of getting a loan improve if you spend time reading information about the loan on their website. Conversely, if you fill out the application typing in all-caps (or with no caps), you are knocked down a couple pegs in that company's eyes. A third lender requires that small business borrowers grant them access to the borrowers' PayPal, eBay and other online payment accounts (what could possibly go wrong with that?), thereby disclosing real-time sales and delivery information."

What happens when someone else uses your real name maliciously to intentionally associate with other accounts under names of people known to be criminals or bad credit risks, OR when your real name is very common, so there are are 50 facebook accounts with your same name?

This kind of thing does happen, so it is important to be transparent so that the issue can be easily appealed and the loan reviewed.

Well; the problem with that is anyone can disavow the legitimacy of their own FB account.
Furthermore; they can't possibly meet the FCRA requirements of disclosing all the pertinent information --- they have to disclose it, BUT if they tell you that Person X your "friend on Facebook" is a deadbeat, then the CRA has just broken the law by providing you private data about someone else's finances.

The problem is, how do you know whether the bank even uses that as a metric?

Institutions wouldn’t get this information straight from Facebook but would instead use one of the many smaller credit reporting agencies and if they make a negative decision based on this, they are required by the Fair Credit Reporting Act to disclose this to you. If that happens, the CRA is then required to provide you a copy of the report provided to the given company. They could try to lie and make up some other excuse but they wouldn’t get away with it many times before a pattern would emerge and they would open themselves up to huge lawsuits should they be caught doing it. It’s worth noting a lot of the smaller CRA’s have the same annual reporting requirements as do the big three and you can request a free report from them. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has a PDF [consumerfinance.gov] that lists many of the smaller CRA’s and how you can contact them.

That said, I think that trying to plumb social networking information and deny credit is on par with redlining. It’s only started happening and I’ve heard of no legal challenges and I doubt the connections on any random social network can be completely separated from any of the factors that can’t be used to make credit decisions - race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age. IANAL, but it would seem just looking at it could greatly increase your risk for an ECOA lawsuit.

There was a much better article [economist.com] about this in the Economist a few months back. The banks don't ask you for a list of your Facebook friends. It doesn't work like that. They get the information as part of your score from credit agencies. You will never even know it is happening. But I don't see why this is worse than other things they consider, like your zipcode or marital status. You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

There was a much better article [economist.com] about this in the Economist a few months back. The banks don't ask you for a list of your Facebook friends. It doesn't work like that. They get the information as part of your score from credit agencies. You will never even know it is happening. But I don't see why this is worse than other things they consider, like your zipcode or marital status. You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

The big question is, when you have your privacy settings turned up do credit agencies still have a way to get your data? And less importantly, if they do turn up empty handed, do they use that against you with equal weight as being "friends" with deadbeats? In other words, is having a well-manicured facebook page now akin to having a cheap car loan (in good standing) on your credit record, to ensure you get a good rate?

Look at your list of Facebook friends if you use it. How many of them have anything to do with your credit worthiness or do you have any idea about their financial lives?

Do you have any high school friends on there? A friend you knew when you were 14 who was cool then but has since become a dead beat? You both share a hobby that you shared at 14 so still talk about that a lot and you should be dinged for his bad decisions?

You have a couple of brothers/cousins/family members who have made horrible financial decisions and declared bankruptcy a couple of times. You have done everything right and are responsible financially and so you are penalized for that?

You join a club quilting club with a FB page and meet a bunch of people and several of them that are active quilters are doing so while foreclosing on their homes and so you deny me a loan?

If the company has no financial information to go off, maybe I can see this being valid, but still a stretch. If you read the article, this company operates in the Philippines, Mexico and I forget the last country. Places where they have very little information to go off so thy use what they can. Judged by the company you keep on FB is ludicrous.

If the company has no financial information to go off, maybe I can see this being valid,

Yup, that's exactly the point of the article which you read.

If I don't have proof whether you're responsible with money, but I do know that you are currently active friends with a deadbeat, your family members are likely highly supportive of you declaring bankruptcy, and your social circle has disproportionally high foreclosure levels, you look like a risk. Short of monitoring your conversations to ensure that you're not discussing anything financial with them, I have to assume that you rub off on them, and they rub off on you. And even if I know good things about you, which rubs off on them positively, this still takes you down a notch, because if you fall on hard times, you don't seem to have a network that will push to help you make your payments, unlike the guy whose friends and family all have stellar credit histories.

That's always the pain of statistical models: someone's an exception. But lenders aren't venture capitalists; nobody's going to pay them back 10x their investment. So they minimize risk. The bank insists on 20% down for the best mortgage rates; the payday lender charges you $45 upfront for the $300 loan. In the absence of personal relationships that establish information and trust, everybody tries to protect their bottom line. Makes sense to me.

And in the case where someone is an exception and can prove that their associations are the cause of being denied a loan or a job or in any way effecting an individual's credit, here comes the lawsuit. You cannot legally be denied employment and your creditworthiness cannot be effected by your associations. This would have far-reaching discriminatory consequences with regard to race, religion, financial 'class', etc. and ultimately force people to cut off others in their life who were not 'reliable'.

Setting this precedent allows a true class-style system to be introduced whereby unless you are in the 'reliable' category, it is almost impossible to become 'reliable' because 'reliable' people won't associate with you or give you jobs. People would potentially be forced to ostracize family or friends from their realm in society for fear of being dubbed 'unreliable'. This sounds eerily like Gattaca except with financial systems instead of genetics (I know that a better reference is Huxley or possibly even McCarthy in some ways but I just watched Gattaca again a few days ago and it is fresh in my mind).

We are already there. Case in point - my wife and I. My family is poor, my mom's already had one bankruptcy, and I now make more than the rest of my family DOUBLED. My wife comes from a solid middle class family, both her mom and her dad have 50K credit cards (real Platinum-class cards back then). She and I married, moved in together, and after a few years started to get credit cards. I got a $300 credit line, she got 5K. My second card eventually got approved, $500. Her second? Over $4000. At this point she has $12k in credit and I have around $4. The only one with a job is me - when she got her cards she was working part-time in a book store making 8.50/hour, prior to that she was in college. I was making 50k a year as a computer programmer.

I got saddled with my family's credit "worthiness" and she benefited from her family's. I *still* cannot get as much credit as she can, even though we've been married for 13 years, my name is on the mortgage, the car loans (one already paid off), and I'm still the only one with a job (she's a stay at home mom), but she keeps getting the card offers in the mail and I don't. So, yes, we are ALREADY in a class-style system for credit.

I think the GP may be referring to the lender's actual financial risk in lending to you. It's very complicated. Essentially though, financial institutions loaning you $300,000 to buy a house don't actually need to have that $300,000 themselves in order to loan it to you. They can essentially loan it to you on a margin and more or less create the money out of thin air. It only starts to become real cost to them if enough people don't pay back their loans.

Look at your list of Facebook friends if you use it. How many of them have anything to do with your credit worthiness or do you have any idea about their financial lives?

Do you have any high school friends on there? A friend you knew when you were 14 who was cool then but has since become a dead beat? You both share a hobby that you shared at 14 so still talk about that a lot and you should be dinged for his bad decisions?

You have a couple of brothers/cousins/family members who have made horrible financial

Using someone's skin color as a factor in whether you grant them credit would also be statistically relevant and improve profit. We don't permit it, for a very good reason.

Only in the modern era has it become possible to discriminate based on so many other criteria as easily as based on race. If someone walked into a loan office, their race was normally visible. But whether they were a Star Trek fan or whether they're in a knitting circle with a deadbeat wasn't, and it wouldn't be worth the lender's effort to find out.

To be clear, if you are in the US your FICO 'credit score' does not contain this kind of stuff. That score is made up of your available credit, repayment history, etc. The 'credit agencies' you refer to are not the agencies that give the FICO score. They are companies that try to determine an applicants creditworthiness in places that don't have the equivalent of FICO scores.

Aside from the obvious issues of reliably associating accounts to people whom are unable to question the association, selling information on their communications and social arrangements with others without their consent and knowledge, while making reliable inferences that defy the natural law of inferences (even when the evidence is rock solid, your error rate can only go up).

Let me give you a clue as to what this story is about.

We have gotten to the point in our civilization where we have leveraged and financialized our lives, society and government to such a degree that we have ran out of actual valuable collateral; things like cars, houses, jobs, businesses, etc; and are now attempting to collateralize abstract things like social contacts.

Meaning, instead of making loans to people who have the actual ability (Job, Investments) or Collateral (Car, House, Boat, Business) to pay, we are instead loaning money (perhaps borrowed money) out to people based upon what amounts to merely their social status because either people have too much debt already or are unwilling in this economic environment (for a variety of factors) are unable to imagine a new scenario in which taking on new debt produces value. Taking out a loan to buy a machine that produces pizza 10x as fast only makes sense if you're the first to do it, if you're the last to do it and take out a loan to do it, chances are you are taking on debt just to stay competitive. When everyone does that with everything, you get the mess that is today.

We're flat out of suckers to keep the ponzi-economy of ever increasing cycles of debt being spent on ever less value afloat and the monstrosities at the top of the pyramid are trying anything to keep the game afloat because they have the most to lose from the collapse; namely their lives, fortunes, status and egos.

This has nothing to do with being judged by the company you keep and everything to do with handing out loans based upon flimsy circumstance (When did Loaning money to Medieval Monarchs Ever work? There's historic precedence for this).

If we had just "dealt with it" every time those with power abused their position, black people would still be slaves, women would still not have the vote, children would still be down in the mines, and manual labourers would still barely earn enough wages to live while working crazy hours under conditions that would seriously damage their health.

We have a long way to go, even in the first world, in terms of respecting each other as human beings. We aren't going to get much further if we adopt your attitude every time essential services that make society work start taking advantage of asymmetric power relationships with the ultimate goal of making more money no matter what.

I don't know why I'm surprised at how little consumer protection there is in the US any more. In the UK credit agencies are regulated and can't just use any information they can lay their hands on. You can add your own notes or get it corrected too.

One thing that is specifically forbidden to be used is who you associate with or who you are related to. That's how we "dealt with it".

It's possible they are using an arbitrary points system such as you describe. It's more likely that they are using statistical analysis to actually measure the extent to which various variables affect people's credit worthiness. That still might not be accurate. But as long as the credit score is slightly better on average is enough to make it worth their while.

Not that I'm defending it. I hate profiling and snooping. But there's no point in pretending it is completely ineffectual when it's probably not.

"Credit scores based on your actual credit history are far more reliable."

The banks agree completely. This Facebook thing is specifically intended for applicants who don't have any credit history.

OK, so either Ralph Wiggam has never heard the term "scope creep," or he works for one of the banks/credit reporting agencies, and therefore has a vested interest in demonizing anyone who points out how fucked up this practice is.

Then again, this is a person who chose to name themselves after a (literally) mentally retarded cartoon character from one of the crappiest shows on TV today...

If I friend a guy I knew 20 years ago in high school who didn't pay off a loan, what does that have to do with my ability to pay off a loan? Not a damn thing.

If you still have no credit history at 38, then you almost certainly still smoke weed with that high school friend in his mom's basement. This has nothing to do with your "real" FICO score, think of it more like the "payday loans" version of a credit rating. Nothing to see here, move along.

These companies aren't banks. They are on-line 'better' ways of getting a loan. Lenddo, from the Philipines, is (according to their web site) "the world’s first online platform that helps the emerging middle class use their social connections to build their creditworthiness and access local financial services." Kredittech, from Germany, "uses BIG DATA and complex machine-learning algorithms to make better credit decisions." Kabbage, from the US, gets loans for small businesses, and they use real-

Dubious credit criteria and validation got us into a huge subprime mortgage mess and contributed to an economic downturn. Fortunately, this method doesn't appear to be widespread, but the same principle applies. Folks haven't learned the lessons of the last 100+ years and seem doomed to repeat the outcomes.

I will present proof by contradiction. The assumption to be disproven: My friends are all creditworthy if I am creditworthy.

As a creditworthy person, I have a good job and always repay loans well in advance. I am responsible with my money. This allows me to volunteer where college students and other people who are not as well off frequent.

Banks like Insurance companies do not care about causation all they care about is correlation. If more than 50% of the people who visit slashdot are bad drivers but good at paying their bills, and they find out you visit slashdot you will get a great rate on a loan and expensive insurance.

No, the problem was that lenders ignored any criteria. They didn't examine entrails before making a loan. They did nothing. Some (e.g. Countrywide) encouraged people to lie on their applications. These were applications for loans from them. They bundled and sold these loans to hapless buyers thanks to incompetent or negligent rating agencies (e.g. S&P) giving these bundles inflated ratings. That's why they didn't care about your worthiness. Read Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short". In this case

Dubious credit criteria and validation got us into a huge subprime mortgage mess

1. This is not "dubious". It is based on plenty of solid evidence.2. The subprime mess was caused (in part) by government pressure to ignore proven credit criteria, along with incentives for banks to not care about the default rate because the risk was borne by quasi-governmental institutions like Fannie Mae, that had an implicit guarantee of a taxpayer bailout.

I haven't seen any evidence that the facebook score is any better than flipping a coin. Certainly TFA presented none (nor did it try, it just reported on what is being used).

The government in no way shape or form suggested that banks should make loans on McMansions to first time buyers (and certainly never suggested that lenders should hard sell bigger loans). It suggested that redlining is not a valid criterion and that banks should make more loans on starter homes. It did not suggest that building a time

At least not as people normally think of it. When you talk about "credit score" what 99.9% of people mean is your FICO score. This is not getting factored in for FICO. Rather this is for people who don't have a normal credit history. If you have a standard credit history with the credit bureaus, a FICO score will be calculated on that and that's the thing lenders will look at. Nobody gives a shit about your Facebook friends if you have a history of paying debts on time.

Only if you're applying for credit or an account at a financial institution as "bmo".

There are plenty of people who post with their real names here.

There are people who have totally fake profiles on Facebook, in spite of the Facebook TOS/AUP.

But that's totally irrelevant to the point I made. The point is that participation in online discussion is vulnerable to data-mining irrespective of the forum. Ranting about Facebook as if it's somehow more "dangerous" than Slashdot, or any other publicly available si

and before you go all, 'dur, NSA + GCSB != private corporate interests,' try to keep in mind that the assault on Dotcom's privacy all began with the MPAA alleging that he was involved in copyright infringement.

... That is, until it hurts your credit to NOT have a Facebook account. It hurts your credit to not have credit cards, it only stands to reason that, if this sort of information is fruitful, it'll cost you to not provide it.

Case in point: a colleague's teenage daughter applied for a summer job at the local supermarket, got selected and went to a job interview. The interviewer asked her to "describe herself". She did, and the interviewer then said "that's not what your Facebook says. Thank you, we'll call you." She's only 16 and she wasn't doing anything particularly public or outrageous on Facebook. It hit her hard and my colleague says she's been kind of depressed by the rejection she's faced.

As for me, I've learned the hard way 13 years ago (before Facebook but after Google) that the internet never forgets, and whatever you say will come back to haunt you eventually. As a result, I've learned to shut my trap online whenever possible.

That crossed my mind, but to understand why that is funny requires you to know who the character is, doesn't it? I thought I'd throw in a link for the benefit of people not familiar with 1980's American television programs.

The bigger question is, when is opting out not going to be an option? At what point is not having a facebook account going to be against the law? At one time, I would have said that was insane...but it's getting pretty damn nutso around here these days.

Not having a Facebook account will likely never be illegal, as such. It's just that failing to provide your Facebook data will be grounds for a lender or an electric company to deny you service. Kind of like Social Security Numbers -- you're not "required" to provide it to a phone company, but the company is free to deny you service if you don't.

She should look on the bright side. She would not have enjoyed working in an environment that stalks her Facebook profile and makes snap judgements without explanations. This is especially true for a PT job at a supermarket.

The summary leaves out that the companies described aren't the major financial institutions in the US. The one who checks to see if you're friends with someone who defaulted on a loan from the same lender? Lenddo, which makes loans in the Phillippes, Colombia, and Mexico. The one who LOOKS FOR ALL CAPS? Kreditech in Germany, which uses that and "up to 8,000 data points" when assessing the loan (though I can't argue with that; as someone sitting down with a banker in person and YELLING THAT THEY WANT A LOAN is probably not a reliable borrower).

As for whether lenders should just use FICO, if FICO is available? It's reliable and predictive, and more difficult to game, but in an emerging market where your prospective borrowers don't have FICO history, what do you do to suss out whether a borrower is likely to default or not?

Looking at friends, I think, would be a great indicator if someone has no credit history, or if they're taking out a large loan and have never done so before. It would be foolish of them to look at your friends if you've got a full history of being responsible with the kind of loan you're asking for -- I can't see them doing this.

And your account logins, OF COURSE THEY WANT THIS. Everyone does, because everyone is fucking evil. I'm totally not surprised. Don't sign up with them

I keep some of my savings at Lending Club [lendingclub.com], which originally started out as a Facebook-based microlending platform -- the idea was that if you knew the people you were lending to, or at least understood their social graph, that you'd make better lending decisions. They dropped the concept a few years ago, my guess is that it didn't scale and there were practical difficulties. (I could see issues arising from sockpuppetry and slander, among other things...)

They do still loan to individuals, and when you lend you read their application, you can see where they live, their FICO, and what they plan to do with the money. And, guilty as charged, I never lend to people to do their application in ALL CAPS:)

As much as I despise ALL CAPS posting, I don't think it has anything to do with creditworthiness. You (and lenders in the article) are making financial decisions based on non-financial characteristics.

For example, I don't like dog owners that don't pick up after their dogs. If I see an application by such person, and they are foolish enough for this to show from reading loan application, I too wouldn't lend them money. Still, this won't have anything to do with their ability to repay the loan.

As much as I despise ALL CAPS posting, I don't think it has anything to do with creditworthiness.

What if it does?

You (and lenders in the article) are making financial decisions based on non-financial characteristics.

I can think of plenty of non-financial characteristics that could (not always, but in specific circumstances) have huge impact on financial decisions -- age, health, family status, religion, race, gender, education, ancestry, criminal record.

Some of those are illegal to consider, but of course that doesn't mean they don't have an impact.

For example, I don't like dog owners that don't pick up after their dogs. If I see an application by such person, and they are foolish enough for this to show from reading loan application, I too wouldn't lend them money. Still, this won't have anything to do with their ability to repay the loan.

What if it does?

You're underestimating what could be surmised about a person's credit worthiness if more data were available.

As much as I despise ALL CAPS posting, I don't think it has anything to do with creditworthiness. You (and lenders in the article) are making financial decisions based on non-financial characteristics.

I would say it is linked to poor education, which is linked with credit worthiness.

One company determines if you are friends with someone who was late paying back a loan; if so, that is bad news for you. It is even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with.

Reasonable but evil. I would not do business with this company.

Another company gathers information from the manner in which a customer fills out the online loan application. The chances of getting a loan improve if you spend time reading information about the loan on their website. Conversely, if you fill out the application typing in all-caps (or with no caps), you are knocked down a couple pegs in that company's eyes.

Reasonable and not evil. Understanding the terms of a loan typically means you're going to make at least a good faith effort to fulfill your obligations. I would probably do something like this myself.

A third lender requires that small business borrowers grant them access to the borrowers' PayPal, eBay and other online payment accounts (what could possibly go wrong with that?), thereby disclosing real-time sales and delivery information.

Unreasonable, evil, AND the potential to steal money from everyone who has applied for a loan! Is that you, Enron?

"were worried" as in past tense? Now I'm worried that the NSA (or underpaid official who works there) will start selling its profiles on people to corporations that cooperate with data collection. A trade of data as it were.

Not a bad idea, IMO. I recall reading one CRA CEO claiming the scoring algorithm couldn't be reverse engineered. Wait a minute. If it's truly a formula based on my credit history, it should absolutely be able to be reverse engineered. It should fall to simple statistical analysis. If it doesn't, then it isn't what it claims to be.

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. -James Madison